Planet Coaster’s due to get a nice big patch sometime around April, but Frontier have decided to do a smaller one, patch 1.1.3, before it to address some of the bugs and quirks of the game, as well as adding a new ride that can be built.

One of the major quirks about the game had to do with guests queuing for rides or sometimes refusing to queue for rides with no queue. This one hasn’t been fully addressed by Frontier in this patch, as there’s so many bits of data that determine a guests’ queuing that they’ve had trouble pinpointing any one thing that is causing the problems. For now they’ve decided to make a tweak that means park goers will now join longer queues, as well as another that fixes how they access the ride queues as well which should hopefully stop them seeing empty queues as full for some reason.

The ride itself is called the Scizzer and has been based off real life Scrambler and Sizzler rides. Guests are swung around on a twin axle centrifuge on a flat surface, and being a fan of the real-life rides they sound brilliant.

Other fixes and additions in patch 1.1.3 include the stamping out of a notorious gift shop bug, a new option to remove certain items from sale in the shops, language options for Korean and Chinese both Simplified and Traditional. There’s also been additional Guest Thoughts added to help players better understand what problems need addressing.

All the patch notes are available on the Planet Coaster forums and there should soon be more details available for the big April update there too.

Recent patches to Overwatch have seen balancing changes to Roadhog’s hook among other things, making the hook a bit easier to escape and a bit harder to aim. Yet it seems that even with all the balancing, the hook still manages to cause players problems.

Right now as of patch 1.7, Roadhog needs to have players in his line of sight to hook them, and once said player breaks line of sight the hook should come detached. At least that’s the idea and for the most part it works out well. Yet it’s been discovered (and documented in gfycats by Reddit user tehGraboiDs) that if a hero with a dash or command jump move is hooked and then uses afore-mentioned move to move out of line of sight the hook stays connected and the captured hero is still pulled up in front of Roadhog.

Research into this by players seems to suggest that it only occurs if the captured hero dashes or jumps across open space though, as the hook will still break off if the hero gets behind an obstacle. This suggests that it’s a glitch where the hook’s code is still reading the captured hero as being ‘in line of sight’ as they’re in open space and thus it’s keeping the hook active. At least, this is what seems to be happening right now and is a pretty good guess.

Expect the next patch to bring more alterations to Roadhog’s hook then. At least for once this is a glitch that you probably won’t get banned for, but still – don’t be silly and abuse it okay? Don’t want to see anyone getting in trouble.

Gears of War 4 already had some cross-playing capabilities between Xbox One and PC players, allowing them to team up for the co-operative modes in game. However, you know gamers and especially gamers who consider themselves good friends relish the opportunity to completely ‘own’ their friends in competitive multiplayer. Well, if you love doing that and you and your friends own Gears of War 4, I have good news for you.

Social Quickplay is now going to see cross-playing extended towards competitive gameplay. So finally you can shoot your friend’s head from your camping spot and watch them expire in a pool of blood, before they respawn and repay the favour of course. Microsoft recently held a beta for the feature, with over 115,000 participants taking part in over 750,000 matches to test matchmaking and other capabilities of this gamemode. Both platforms apparently had similar K/D ratio results, score and kills. Match quality was also perfect for most players, so the feature is being rolled out soon.

I’d say that if you’re going to give it a go though, don’t expect perfect results first time. 115,000 people is a lot, but more might possibly stress something to breaking point before Microsoft get everything running shipshape. Not saying it’s going to happen, just be ready for minor issues.

Core multiplayer will be separate from Competitive, so if you’d rather limit your pool of random players to people on the same platform as you, you’re still able to do that as well.

Sometimes people have a drive in mind when they make their game. They may want to make a spiritual successor to a game they enjoyed when a child, or seek to create a game that they’ve always wanted to play themselves but no one else ever made. Or, sometimes they just want the world to know how much they love one particular make of car.

Russian Car Driver is a racing game that challenges the player to “Drive like Russian”. A big thing is made in the game of how ‘wonderful’ the VAZ 2108 car is, with characters in the story mode saying how good it is and the promos talking about the car as if getting to drive it is a huge deal. The car itself can be kind of customised, with the body colour and hub colour being the main two options, with special unique ‘styles’ available for unlock when you complete certain tasks in the game’s modes.

Speaking of which, there’s about five modes with four of them being racing or driving challenges of sorts and the fifth being a freedrive mode with optional story mode. However, upon launch some of these modes are locked and you once again need to complete a task to unlock them. Racing is what this game was sold upon being, and with a standard race and a rally you at least have options there.

The freedrive mode with story is where I spent a lot of time though, driving around and trying to discover what would (cows, deer, road signs, fences) and wouldn’t (buildings, bears, other vehicles, some larger trees) be flattened under the wheels of my tires. Every now and then the story would advance by the next mission quest text being sent via texts on the phone, in slightly broken English. I’m giving that the benefit of the doubt though, as we’re apparently in Russia and English is not the first language there. Hell, it adds a little charm for me. What confuses me is that even when the quest giver is standing next to you, they will still text you rather than talking. I didn’t think everyone was that plugged into their phones. You also gain experience by driving around, but every level up is rather sudden, with the game suddenly coming to a pause as the ‘level up’ attributes menu just pops up without a sound. Choose which attribute to improve and then suddenly you’re back in the game. It’s rather jarring, and what’s worse, picking up the 25 special information manual pickups on the car’s history will trigger the same jarring silent cut from the game.

This game does not look good, it doesn’t handle crisply although not bad at all, and frankly the races were a pain to try and win. The control system was a bit fiddly and even when I got comfortable with it, I’d still sometimes be losing control. This game is in the ‘so bad it’s good’ category for some and I can see why.

It’s not for me though.

3/10